Back to school and back to the same old everyday sexism

We know that young girls are limiting their physical activity or feeling uncomfortable in their daily uniforms … and we still make them wear dresses.

It’s the early weeks of back-to-school, my six-year-old has just had his first day and we’re in the realms of new bags, sharpened pencils and shiny shoes. It’s lovely. It’s exciting. But something is badly amiss and it keeps coming back to haunt me. It’s as simple as this; uniforms.

Girls' uniforms to be precise.

I’m a mother of two boys, so the problem that got me so worked up shouldn’t really affect me. But it does.

We’ve been attending all the requisite ‘first day’ talks, meet and greets and welcoming committee morning teas. It’s been lovely. But it was at one of these talks that I was confronted with something that disturbed me deeply about how we shape boys and girls in their early years.

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Sitting in the hall we were afforded the opportunity to order uniforms and to ask all the much-needed parental questions; how many hats should we get, what are regulation shoes, and how many shirts should I buy…

It all seemed pretty standard, until one parent unassumingly asked how many tunics she should purchase for her daughter. The response floored me.

The hosting committee member (who was doing a stellar job of fielding all the questions) promptly advised the gathered parents that ‘we find the girls are often uncomfortable wearing their tunics to drama and movement based classes [outside of sport classes], so perhaps get an extra sport uniform’, was the recommendation.

I was astonished.

How is it that we know—we actually know—that young girls are limiting their physical activity or feeling ‘uncomfortable’ in their daily uniforms… and we still make them wear dresses?

And yet, no one batted an eyelid.

Image: Supplied

As I mentioned, I have boys, and I only have my experience with my own children to go off, but I would be appalled to think that on a regular basis I was limiting their capacity to experience the world because of what I asked them to wear—the odd special occasion aside.

I have some very distinct memories of saying to my own mum when I was about seven or eight years old, ‘I want to be a boy mum’. When she asked me why, I can recall as clearly as yesterday saying ‘because they get to wear shorts and climb things,’ to which she laughed and said, ‘but you can do that too’.

Image: Supplied

My mother wasn’t overly progressive. She didn’t send me to school in shorts, but she did help me understand –even right back then—that girls shouldn’t be restricted by what they wear.

And yet over 30 years later that’s still not the message we are sending them, from their earliest days in the playground. It’s these formative years when we should be setting up relationships with good physical activity and teaching girls about their freedom to move and be in this world. But we are still putting them in dresses and acknowledging that they are finding them restrictive and ‘uncomfortable’ when it comes to expressing their physicality. It’s a casual and indoctrinated kind of backwards thinking and sexism that continues to shape how young women place themselves in the world.

If we know –because they are telling us—that little girls are modifying their physicality because of what they wear at school, imagine what this does their developing sense of self.

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It teaches them from such an early age that when it comes to the physical world boys have right of way, and that girls take second place. That they must modify their dress and behaviour to be included –and take extra steps to change themselves—just so they can enjoy their physical world in the same way boys do. It teaches them that they have less right to use their bodies than boys have to use their own.

And in an age of #metoo, where we should be teaching girls that they have control over their own bodies, surely something this simple should be an easy starting point, because it would teach boys something very subtle too; that girls really are in charge of their own physicality.

Let them run and be free and climb monkey bars. It’s as simple as changing a school uniform.